101 Things, Part 2: January 2013

I’m into my second iteration of the “101 Things in 1001 Days” program. This time, I wrote a more realistic list, and I’m actually sort of planning how to nail all these things down. The New List is here.

Items Accomplished in January: 3Items Underway in January: 14

Total Progress: 4/101 (3.9%)

Days Remaining: 960Tasks Remaining: 97Days Per Task: 9.8

Accomplished

16. Figure out a lesson plan for framebuilding

In the spirit of paying it forward, I do want to start taking on the occasional student — it probably won’t happen until 2015, but I do think there’s merit in doing it. I’ve got a syllabus put together, and I’ll probably take on my first student at a highly reduced rate.

69. Establish a chore schedule (1 task per day) and stick to it

This was pretty easy to do — I simply set up a list of reminders in the iPhone that are triggered to go off on the appropriate day when I arrive home (geo/time triggered). Here’s the schedule:Monday: trash/recycling out
Tuesday: pick up library
Wednesday: kitchen
Thursday: laundry work
Friday: Day Off
Saturday: lawn (seasonal)
Sunday: litterboxes

96. Read A Confederacy of Dunces

The first time I ever tried to read this, I bought a used copy from Amazon. It showed up and it fucking reeked of cigarette smoke. The smell was so bad I couldn’t focus on it, and it just didn’t do much for me. I decided that I should finally sit down and read it — so I slapped it on the Kindle app and tore in. This time, it was an easier read.

In-Progress

15. Design and manufacture a track dropout

I started doing sketches for this. Some of them are real dogs, others have potential. I’ll be posting pics in this Flickr set.

22. Using raw materials, build my own chainstay fixture

Have been doing some rough sketches in preparation for doing the CAD work. The design is based heavily on the Anvil chainstay fixture, using 8020 extrusion for the base, cross-beam, and axle tower.

During the month of January, I watched 3 movies: No Country for Old Men, Platoon, and Chariots of Fire.

45. Try 10 new (to me) restaurants (3/10)

This month, I visited the Lyndale Taphouse, FACES Mears Park, and Solera.

49. Create WP Theme, GPL Release

On the 1st of the month I got Apache running and PHP5 going, too. Installed WordPress as my dev platform. Got all the various libraries corralled to build this one out. Got some good brainstorming and sketching done, and started laying down code. This is going to be a bit of an undertaking, so it’s not going to be super-fast — even if I had hoped to have this one done this month. Next step is to test the theme options and see if I have everything working properly, and if I do, then I need to start working on implementing the visual layer.

53. Learn Ruby on Rails

Got Rails up and running and tied to MySQL. Haven’t bothered to link it to Apache yet, as I’m still very much in the learning phase. Been doing some reading on the subject, and found a tutorial to execute on. Once done with that, I plan to start hammering away at the web app idea (#55 on the list) will go a long way toward my better understanding of this.

51. Get my Reddit karma up over 2000. (850/2000)

Moving along. Got a ~400-point post on the 30th of the month. A couple more should push me over 2000, no problem.

54. Redesign template for this blog

Started doing the sketches for this. Once I’ve got #49 (above) done, I’ll be in a better position to finish this. The design I’m creating for myself doesn’t need to be as complicated as the one I’m making for the previous task — that one has lots of jQuery, some options, etc. My personal one will be much more straightforward.

80. Contribute to my 401K regularly

This was done…for about two weeks. Then the reality of single-income, benefits, etc., took over and we had to back-burner the 401K withholding for a bit. So be it. It’ll get done eventually.

81. Save all my spare change for 1001 days, or until the container is full

Got all of these downloaded and onto my Kindle/iPad. Let the en-read-ification commence!

101. Write a novel

Brainstorming, character creating, etc. is in-progress and I’ve started committing words here and there as snippets occur to me. Trying to kill my inner editor long enough to get the first draft done. Scrivener is a huge help with this. How did I write before it came along?